raised by wolves
“I’ve been thinking about degradation recently, about what that word really means,” I told my best friend. I was eating a DoorDashed side salad. “I’ve been in a lot of degrading environments. I’m thinking about what that implies. Degradation suggests that that all my defining characteristics have been gradually taken away. That I’m all fuzzy now, indistinct, maybe easier to project onto,” I said. “Like I’m a copy of a copy of a copy of myself.” I took a bite of salad.
“A copy of a copy,” my best friend murmured. “Like cloning?”
This got her dad and husband talking. They were very animated. “Are you guys talking about sci-fi,” she asked them suspiciously.
“Y’all know I love ‘90s Outer Limits,” I said to her dad now. “The great philosophers of our time.”
“What was that one with Sylvester Stallone—” her dad began. He described it. By now I’d stood up to dispose of my plastic salad plate.
“Are you thinking of Total Recall?” I asked from the sink.
“No,” my best friend’s husband said.
“No,” her dad said. “It had Sandra Bullock in it…”
“Repo Man,” I said.
“No,” the men said in unison.
I frowned. “I’m sorry,” I said finally. “Demolition Man.”
“That’s it,” my best friend’s dad said. He said something about Sylvester Stallone being frozen as punishment—
“They Han Solo’d him?” I asked as I sat back down at the table.
“Y-yes,” her dad said. “He and Wesley Snipes had been sent to prison—”
“—for tax evasion,” I said, nodding serenely. My best friend snorted.
Now her dad was recommending TV shows to me. He mentioned one called “Bebop Cowboy.” My eyebrows flew up and I peered over at my best friend, but then I realized she wouldn’t’ve known why I was grimacing.
“Live-action or anime?” I asked him. This question was not answered, so I waited before interjecting again: “Sorry, this show…. Are you talking about Cowboy Bebop the cartoon, or did this have real actors in it?”
“Real people,” he said.
“Ah.”
“I think it’s on Netflix.”
I nodded. “It would be,” I agreed.
My best friend’s dad recently discovered streaming services. “I heard him watching a movie in the bathroom,” I whispered to her a couple weeks ago, “like a full action movie on the toilet.” We both collapsed.
“I think he’s realized he can watch movies while he babysits,” she said.
“I think so, too,” I said, and we laughed again.
Before dinner, we’d watched two episodes from the second season of Only Murders in the Building, since Grandpa had taken the kiddos outside—babysitting, presumably, over the top edge of his smartphone.
It was the scene where Selena Gomez’s character Mabel walks into her own enormous apartment, only to realize that Cara Delevingne has staged and reconstructed multiple crime scenes from Mabel’s life, casting actors and dressing them to look like people who have passed away.
Mabel goes into shock.
You weren’t supposed to see this, Delevingne says something like, at least not yet. I was hoping, if you saw your trauma through the lens of fine art—
“What,” my best friend breathed, unable to process Delevingne’s fictional character’s devious criminal mind.
“I think I can see this both ways now,” I said. “Like, now I can maybe see the good in doing a Synecdoche, New York”—forcing someone to examine their own life as if merely an observer, trapped in a Scrooge reenactment with a sort of clinical distance—“but when I first saw this episode, I remember I was really disturbed.” My college boyfriend had broken our deal, had written about my life multiple times and then read his versions out loud in class. Egregiously, he’d passed a number of real-life judgments on my real-life childhood bedroom while our peers sat there frozen.
“Hands off! My life is not content for you to use,” I concluded.
Then I trailed off, worrying about my extremely readable online diary. I try to not describe what’s going on with other people, but I haven’t executed this exactly perfectly. (“I try to offer plausible deniability. I protect my sources,” I recently joked to a friend on the phone.)
I remember, the first and only time I saw Synecdoche, New York, I’d said something about the “concentric rings of bullshit” we build up around ourselves self-protectively. What we mistake for ‘trauma processing’ might actually be running laps farther and farther away from the core wound.
The husky pushed open my bedroom door and walked in. She pretended to look for dropped food under my desk.
“Ah,” I said aloud. “So everyone left?” She sidled over and I sat up. “And now you’re here to hang out with boring ol’ me,” I said, scratching her ear.
She backed away from me, all the way to the open door, trying to taunt me into following her. Aching, I got to my feet.
“I’m too reliable,” I sighed as the dog led me to the kitchen. “No one in this family even knows you love me. You go from one person to the next, and then you only come find me once they’re gone.” I picked up a can of dog food. “I think you take me for granted,” I told her.
She sometimes retrieves me because I’m the one who mixes her food the way she likes it. I plopped her food dish onto the floor. She stared at me. I sighed and added a Greenie to her dish.
I’d been making a midnight snack. I was reaching into the fridge for some Mae Ploy Sweet Chili Sauce to put on top of my ramen noodles.
It was my then-boss who’d first told me to put Mae Ploy on top of my instant ramen. She knew she wasn’t paying me a livable wage, so she was actively trying to think of lifehacks, little luxurious ways to make my starvation less dire.
You’re so lucky to work for me, she once told me, reasoning that there was no other boss who would ever let me leave work, go to another state every time my parents suffered a medical emergency. She’d come up with this while trying to soothe herself. Technically she was right. Twice she’d accused me of taking advantage of her, to my outrage. Now that I was looking back on this, I could see it was projection. She loved our friendship—the feeling of being seen and appreciated, my unwavering loyalty, how much of myself I’d staked in her future—but she was mad at me for my own bad boundaries, for letting her feel all the shame she felt. Before my wedding reception, she’d pulled me aside, gripped me by the arm: “I’m so glad you married a giver,” she whispered. “Until now you’ve only dated takers.” I smiled, but it shook me up enough that I still remember it clearly.
By now I’d tightened the cap of the Mae Ploy and had shelved it, and now I was in the pantry putting away my McCormick Umami Seasoning. “I forgive you,” I said out loud to her wryly, laughing, with blessedly no one around to hear me. “Besides,” I said, and I sighed wistfully as I sealed a bag and put it on the shelf, “I’m grateful for all the time we got to spend together.”
“I started playing this game, Promise Mascot Agency,” I told my best friend. “The main character, the character you play, is an orphan who was taken in by the Matriarch of a Yakuza cartel, a crime family. There are other orphans, too, and you’ve all pledged your undying loyalty to the Matriarch because she brought you all in off the street.” I shook my head. “You’re really just cannon fodder to protect the family’s golden child, the biological son, obviously.”
My best friend nodded emphatically. Yes, obviously.
“My friend was telling me this is how the Yakuza really works, welcoming orphans in,” I continued. “I guess all gangs do that. I said the Matriarch was the same characterization as Shredder in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.” I paused. “My friend said she kind of feels bad for the Yakuza, since they really do afford people without any prospects a chance at a better life.”
My best friend scowled. “A better life,” she finally sputtered.
I hesitated. “I know,” I said, rubbing my lower lip, “that galled me a little, too.” The idea that you’re offering someone a ‘better’ life is a lie you’d tell yourself if you wanted to justify exploiting somebody. Who’s to say what life a person would or would not be capable of accomplishing on their own? Who’s to dictate what a ‘better’ life looks like?
“Growing up, I never thought of myself as an orphan,” I began.
“No!” my best friend agreed, horrified.
I went on to describe all the ways in which I was not what people consider an ‘orphan’ while my best friend nodded.
“But when I explain that I’m adopted, people will go,” and I frowned exaggeratedly, and I put on a cloying, pretend-concerned voice, “‘Did you know your real parents?’ And I’m like ‘yes’ and then they’re like ‘…oh,’” and here I made a slightly disgusted, does-not-compute face. If a single detail is dissonant, if a detail doesn’t harmonize with the pathological narrative people already have in their heads, they will eyeball you as if you’ve been leading them on this whole time. They’re trying to project a particular narrative onto you, getting mad at you when it doesn’t fit, when it doesn’t transpose perfectly. They feel cheated, robbed.
“[My adoptive mom] was right,” I continued, “I should not have told anyone anything about my life. She always warned me not to. At the time, I’d believed she was creating a lot of pointless shame,” I said. I sighed. “But she was right, people will not understand. The more you share, the less your life fits tidily into a story they’ve heard before. It just isn’t a story they’ve heard before.
“And they want to make you fit into a story that people already know,” I continued, “so they conveniently forget or omit all these little autobiographical details about you”—in their bizarre, unrecognizable retellings of you to you, to themselves, to their own family members or to any of the other people around you, making themselves into your savior while meticulously leaving out that you were an heiress, for example, a sort of narrative heist, casting themselves as the hero of someone else’s story—“because you aren’t a story people have heard before.”